Football is Like Dogfighting, MMA Isn't

In the current issue of the New Yorker, our favorite Torontonian writer Malcolm Gladwell writes on the similarities between dog fighting, an almost universally scorned activity, and the most popular sport in North America, pro football. His first point was that combatants in both must, a priori to the sports themselves, suffer unreasonable physical harm. The dogs often fight until one dies while football players suffer crazy head collisions that regularly lead to dementia and death. Gladwell then makes a parallel between the dog owners and the football fans/coaches. In both cases, approval is given exclusively to those combatants willing, without second thoughts, to continuously suffer. It's an exploitative relationship, a breach of trust. Gladwell says it's like the army general who creates all this loyalty in his soldiers just so that he can lead them off a cliff. Gladwell gives examples when clearly injured football players were not allowed to take time off to heal, that the most lauded guys were the ones who played to the detriment of their own health. 

This past weekend I watched former middleweight champion Jermain Taylor get KTFO'd for the 3rd time in 4 fights. After Arthur Abraham detonated a straight right on his chin, the German crowd roared. Next week over at the UFC, Lyoto Machida is set to beat the shit out of Mauricio Rua. Both sports are so similar, at least aesthetically, that pub and forum debates rage about which sport is better. (And to the reporter who asked, Bernard Hopkins replied that MMA is gay porno). More interesting is that philosophically the sports are much different. Check for instance when Gladwell's dog fighting analogy is applied to each.

He does mention boxing in his article in that the repeated punches to the head in boxing equals the repeated collisions in football especially in the case of defensive linemen who take shots on every play. In the last year alone, there were two high profile boxing suicides (Gladwell connects suicide with dementia): Arturo Gatti and Alexis Arguello. I watched a lot of Gatti's fights and he was the type of guy who was no defensive genius. He took tons of flush power shots in his trilogy with Mickey Ward, and in his one-sided losses to Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather. It's because of his self-destructive style that he was so popular. Fans and boxing pundits celebrate Gatti as "warrior" yet they complain that Floyd Mayweather is boring because he never gets hit. In fact, Gatti will make it to the HOF largely because he took so much damage, because, in softer language, his fights were so "entertaining". Gatti is the good fight dog. And like football, there are no internal controls for fighters to minimize the damage they take. The boxing culture doesn't allow for a fighter to excuse himself from a beating, mid-fight. Victor Ortiz after his loss to Maidana said that he just gave up and he has yet to live that down in the fight press. 

MMA, with it's elbows and knees, does look the more vicious sport. But the MMA world better draws the line between sport and masochistic spectacle. Ironically, John McCain called MMA glorified cockfighting, yet he is an unabashed boxing fan. MMA does have an internal control built-in: the tapout. It's a practical function of the sport's grappling component to avoid in-cage limb-breaking and death via choking. But the tapout can also be used to stop a fight because of injury or because a fighter is simply taking too many shots. While Ortiz got reamed for stopping, guys like GSP get virtually no flak for tapping to strikes. Of course the warrior mentality is valued in MMA, but it's more humane, more sporting, that a fighter himself can decide when he's had enough. The MMA fighter can walk up to the cliff's edge but he's not expected to go over mindlessly.

I can't speak for football too well because I'm not a knowledgeable fan. So where I stand there is that I wouldn't mind if they drastically altered the sport for the sake of players' safety. But while I wouldn't mind at all if they say changed the size and look of football helmets, I would likely stop watching pro boxing if at some point headgear became mandatory or if there was some equivalent of a tap out rule implemented. I am a boxing fan in no small part at the fact that fighters are pushed to the edge and the resultant threat of danger makes them accomplish crazy feats. Because of the proximity to death, no other athletes in the world push themselves to a higher peak of spiritual, mental, and physical health. It's sort of anti-human that I would subsume the fighter to the sport, but what can I say? I like boxing precisely because it's a bit wrong.